| Curse Ov Dialect is something of an odd bird, even for experimental label Mush, whose entire reputation is staked on genre-stretching acts. Weaving together threads from sources as diverse as gypsy dances, Sikh dervish tunes, carnival-ride jangles, Oriental opera, and Arabic calls-to-prayer (to name just a few of their sources), COD’s third album, Wooden Tongues, makes a case for a truly multicultural hip-hop. While their basic template is drawn from the Anticon collective’s sprawling indie-hop aesthetic, the members of COD graft a hyperawareness of race and class issues, as well as a willingness to engage them progressively, onto these frames, putting far more at stake than most hip-hop acts. Sonically, Wooden Tongues meanders like the delta of a great river: there are many separate channels, currents & streams, all of them leading to the same place, but passing through different patches of land along the way. What ties the album together is the unity of the vocal styles, which maintain a challenging, rapid-fire attack throughout. COD’s four MCs (Vulk Makedonski, August 2, Atarungi, and Raceless) each have a unique voice, but they all share a penchant for a ranting, stream-of-consciousness delivery. This combination of voices, set against the incredible diversity of the music, produces mixed results. On the one hand, a track such as “Renegades,” which opens the album, juxtaposes lively fife lines and Japanese chants against a solid break-beat to create a propulsive vehicle for a largely nonsensical stream of lyrics. The music ushers the vocals along in such a way that it doesn’t matter so much that they are hardly understandable. “Word Up Forever” and “Broken Feathers” work in much the same way. Both tracks contain elements which elevate them above the mire of the source material. On the other hand, a song like “Saturday Night,” following the synergetic “Renegades,” layers jazzy piano and a soft hi-hat/bass combination, which sounds real nice on its own, but turns to a cartoonish Cab Calloway caricature when the half-sung vocals come in. The mix of styles can be difficult to digest, and often there is very little separating the tracks that find a flow from those that don’t. The minor differential between the two is often not quantifiable; sometimes the sound combinations simply come off as comical rather than inventive. Wooden Tongues is a terribly ambitious album; while no one wants to penalize a band for ambition, the quick pace of the album as a whole and the rapidity with which very different sounds are flung about makes for a scattershot listening experience: not wholly without reward, but just as likely to be aggravating as enlightening. - Urban Pollution |
